Prospero and caliban in robinson crusoe, kim, heart of darkness, and a passage to India

Abstract

Taking Shakespeare's Prospero and Caliban as a paradigmatic binary and basing its theoretical approach on cultural materialism and postcoloniality, the present study attempts to address the issue of the coloniser-colonised relationship in four canonical novels in English literature, namely Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Edward Morgan Forster's A Passage to India. The study is conducted in the light of the British Empire's development starting from its incipiency up till its downfall in the twentieth century. This study examines the way in which the changing historical context of British colonialism bears on each writer's vision of colonial relations as reflected in his narrative through his characterisation and his dramatisation of the colonial encounter and, at the same time, attempts to track signs of consistency in the four writers' conceptions of colonial relationships so as to verify the hypothesis that despite the varying writers' views and despite the unquestionable influence of the changing colonial context, the colonial encounter is consistently conceived as a strong to weak and superior to inferior relationship; a core that proves immune to the historical changes of British expansionism